Participant Bios
Below, you can write as much or as little as you would like about your self, your work, and your interest in the session.
Session Organizers Bill Penuel is Director of Evaluation Research for the Center for Technology at SRI International. His expertise is in the areas of technology-supported classroom-based assessment, program evaluation, and science and technology education policy. His research projects, which have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, have examined the effects of networked handheld computers on science and mathematics learning, the relationship between professional development activities and curriculum implementation in science, and the effects of intra-organizational dynamics on reform implementation. Currently, he is a senior researcher for the NSF-funded center, Learning in Informal and Formal Environments, where he is studying how curriculum materials informed by learning sciences research can be enacted successfully in diverse classroom settings. He also is Principal Investigator of the Contingent Pedagogies project, an NSF-funded project that is investigating how classroom network technology can improve assessment in middle school Earth science classrooms. His research has appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, American Journal of Evaluation, Science Education, and Educational Studies of Mathematics. He holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Clark University, where his committee members were Jim Wertsch, Jim Gee, and Nancy Budwig. In fall 2011, he will join the faculty of the School of Education at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Kevin O’Connor is assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His scholarship focuses on human action, communication, and learning as socioculturally organized phenomena. One major strand of research has explored the varied trajectories taken by students as they attempt to enter professional disciplines such as engineering, and focuses on the dilemmas encountered by students as they move through these institutionalized trajectories. Another strand of research has explored community organizing efforts that aim to construct new trajectories into valued futures for youth, especially those of nondominant communities. He is co-editor (with Bill Penuel) of a 2010 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook, Learning Research as a Human Science. Other work has appeared in Linguistics and Education; Mind, Culture, and Activity; Anthropology & Education Quarterly; Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science; and the Journal of Engineering Education. His teaching interests include developmental psychology; sociocultural theories of communication, learning, and identity; and discourse analysis. He holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Clark University.
Antero Garcia is an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Utilizing his classroom as a hub of youth participatory action research, Antero and his students jointly create and assess the needs of their South Central community. As a doctoral student in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Antero’s research focuses on developing critical literacies and civic identity through the use of mobile media and game play in formal learning environments. In 2008 Antero co-developed the Black Cloud Game. A Digital Media and Learning Competition award recipient, the Black Cloud provoked students to take real time assessment of air quality in their community. Using custom-developed sensors that measure and send data about air quality, students critically analyzed the role pollution played in their daily lives and presented recommendations to their community. Antero is a 2010-2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellow, providing teacher input and feedback on national education policy initiatives. Updates about Antero’s work can be found on his blog, The American Crawl.
Anne Nordholm is the executive director of the Great Lakes Constructivist Consortium (GLCC, Milwaukee, WI) whose mission is to advocate for and facilitate self-directed and inter-dependent learning environments; reorient citizens to demand learning environments that go beyond a narrow emphasis on the cognitive dimension, and co-create thriving communities by promoting connections among adolescent learners and the communities of practicing adults. Prior to directing GLCC, Nordholm was a small school development coach as part of the High School Redesign Initiative in Milwaukee funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She has served as faculty and project manager for institutions of higher education, has been a learning coordinator for a local school district and has taught at all grade levels, kindergarten - graduate/post-graduate. Her areas of continuing interest and study include constructivism, democratic learning organizations, assessment, teacher education and licensing, project based learning, and meaningful work/school partnerships. She has a PhD from Marquette University.
Suzanne Porath is currently a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction – Literacy studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison and adjunct faculty at Concordia University. As a classroom teacher, she has taught grades 6-12 in English Language Arts, history, science, drama, and study skills, plus supported teachers as a reading teacher, curriculum coordinator and team leader. Much of her experience teaching has been in American international schools in Brazil, Lithuania, and Aruba. Her PhD focuses on investigating literature discussion groups through the analytical lens of activity theory, with a research design based on formative design experiments. In addition, she is interested in the use of social media for teacher learning and professional development designs that support the principals of andragogy.
Wen Ma is an Associate Professor of Education at Le Moyne College. His research interests include the Chinese educational perspective, participatory discussion across grade and ability levels, strategies for English Language Arts and other content areas, and English language learners’ literacy learning and social development. His recent research addresses diverse Asian students’ identity and socialization issues, graduate students’ engagement with disciplinary discourse, and foreign-born professors’ pedagogical journeys and transformations in multicultural settings.
Yoonhee Lee is a doctoral candidate in Education at Arizona State University with a concentration in Language and Literacy. She majored in computer science as an undergraduate, but she didn't realize the strong relationship between technology and learning, identity and gaming, and language/literacy and gaming until she worked with Dr. Gee and Dr. Hayes. Through the SimSavvy project, she became interested in different ways of learning in online gaming communities. Her research interests are specialist language learning, English for specific purpose, and the ways of constructing and contributing knowledge in online game communities; also developing designing thinking and becoming social coordinators through participating in gaming communities.
Lisa Yamagata-Lynch is an Associate Professor in Education at the Northern Illinois University. Her expertise is in the areas of activity systems analysis methods, teacher technology curriculum integration, K-12 school and university partnerships, and instructional design. Her publications have been in journals such as Mind, Culture, and Activity and The Journal of the Learning Sciences. Her most recent work was a book titled Activity Systems Analysis Methods: Understanding Complex Learning Environments published from Springer. In Fall 2011 she will join the faculty of the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Carla Amaro-Jiménez is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual and English as a Second Language Education at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests include pre- and in-service teacher preparation for culturally and linguistically diverse environments, equity issues related to the schooling of Latino, bilingual English language learners, and implementation of technology for second language learning and teaching. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Distance Education, Childhood Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and the National Journal of Urban Education and Practice. She's currently a Co-PI and the Program Director for G-Force, a Texas-wide initiative aimed at increasing the number of traditionally underserved and underrepresented students seeking a postsecondary education.
Jamillah Grant's expertise is in the area of instructional uses of technology in education. She particularly interested in exposing the diversity gap in technology and ways to change the landscape of computing and information technology to include diverse populations. During her term at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Barbados, she formed the research group, Scholarship of Teaching through Action Research on Teaching, (START). The group has produced several collaborative action research which were published as books, book chapters and in various peer-reviewed journals in the UK, Canada, Italy, and Barbados both in print and online. The most recent publication is Sophomores Use of Productivity ToolsThe International Journal of Latest Trends in Computing. Other publications are Sizing Up Students for Successful Blended LearningJournal of Higher Education in the Caribbean UNESCO; Helping New Faculty Document their Scholarship through the Creation of e-Portfolios: Actapress, Calgary, Canada; New Directions in University Education: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Barbados; Teaching French in the Anglophone Caribbean, Barbados and Let the Games Begin! Naples, Italy.
Jacqueline Hotchkiss is a doctoral student in the educational psychology/learning sciences department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her background is in preschool and afterschool programming. As a Master's student, Jacqueline was the site coordinator of the Magical Web in Sacramento; an adaptation of the 5th Dimension program developed by Michael Cole. Currently she is working as a site coordinator in the CU-Boulder adaptation of this program, El Pueblo Magico. Jacqueline's academic interests include: the interrelationships of identity, learning and practice, undergraduate learning, the design of expansive learning environments, project-based learning and discourse analysis.
Kersti Tyson has spent the year with a foot in two worlds. She is a graduate student in the Learning Sciences Program at the University of Washington, where she is completing her dissertation. In addition, she is completing her first year in a faculty position in the Teacher Education Department at the University of New Mexico. Where, upon completion of her dissertation, she will be an assistant professor. Her dissertation is a study of how teachers and children listen to one another in two upper elementary classrooms. She is interested in understanding if and how listening matters when it comes to learning and being educated. While at the University of Washington, Kersti participated in a longitudinal research study examining one teacher education program's innovation of placing preservice teachers in community based organizations to better prepare candidates to teach children whose backgrounds are different from their own -- particularly children who attend high-needs schools.
Alan Nathan is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW Madison. His dissertation work will look at the effect of Upward Bound on high school achievement and attainment. His general research interest is how school transitional programs such as Head Start, Upward Bound, and even the GED exam impact in-school measures such as achievement and attainment and out-of-school measures such as income and employment. His long-term career goal is to be an evaluation researcher specializing in K-12 interventions. He was motivated to join this group by virtue of his exposure to earlier readings and course work on design-based research and a general interest in learning sciences.
Adam York is a doctoral student in the educational psychology/learning sciences department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His background is in mental health counseling for youth. Currently Adam is working on a YPAR project, Critical Civic Inquiry (secondary students engaged in research on school reform issues) and REACH Mentoring (creating spaces for community among first-generation college students). Adam's academic interests include: participatory social-design experiments, multiple literacies, civic/political engagement and action, and sociocultural theories.
Below, you can write as much or as little as you would like about your self, your work, and your interest in the session.
Session Organizers
Bill Penuel is Director of Evaluation Research for the Center for Technology at SRI International. His expertise is in the areas of technology-supported classroom-based assessment, program evaluation, and science and technology education policy. His research projects, which have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, have examined the effects of networked handheld computers on science and mathematics learning, the relationship between professional development activities and curriculum implementation in science, and the effects of intra-organizational dynamics on reform implementation. Currently, he is a senior researcher for the NSF-funded center, Learning in Informal and Formal Environments, where he is studying how curriculum materials informed by learning sciences research can be enacted successfully in diverse classroom settings. He also is Principal Investigator of the Contingent Pedagogies project, an NSF-funded project that is investigating how classroom network technology can improve assessment in middle school Earth science classrooms. His research has appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, American Journal of Evaluation, Science Education, and Educational Studies of Mathematics. He holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Clark University, where his committee members were Jim Wertsch, Jim Gee, and Nancy Budwig. In fall 2011, he will join the faculty of the School of Education at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Kevin O’Connor is assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His scholarship focuses on human action, communication, and learning as socioculturally organized phenomena. One major strand of research has explored the varied trajectories taken by students as they attempt to enter professional disciplines such as engineering, and focuses on the dilemmas encountered by students as they move through these institutionalized trajectories. Another strand of research has explored community organizing efforts that aim to construct new trajectories into valued futures for youth, especially those of nondominant communities. He is co-editor (with Bill Penuel) of a 2010 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook, Learning Research as a Human Science. Other work has appeared in Linguistics and Education; Mind, Culture, and Activity; Anthropology & Education Quarterly; Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science; and the Journal of Engineering Education. His teaching interests include developmental psychology; sociocultural theories of communication, learning, and identity; and discourse analysis. He holds a PhD in Developmental Psychology from Clark University.
Antero Garcia is an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. Utilizing his classroom as a hub of youth participatory action research, Antero and his students jointly create and assess the needs of their South Central community. As a doctoral student in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Antero’s research focuses on developing critical literacies and civic identity through the use of mobile media and game play in formal learning environments. In 2008 Antero co-developed the Black Cloud Game. A Digital Media and Learning Competition award recipient, the Black Cloud provoked students to take real time assessment of air quality in their community. Using custom-developed sensors that measure and send data about air quality, students critically analyzed the role pollution played in their daily lives and presented recommendations to their community. Antero is a 2010-2011 U.S. Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellow, providing teacher input and feedback on national education policy initiatives. Updates about Antero’s work can be found on his blog, The American Crawl.
Anne Nordholm is the executive director of the Great Lakes Constructivist Consortium (GLCC, Milwaukee, WI) whose mission is to advocate for and facilitate self-directed and inter-dependent learning environments; reorient citizens to demand learning environments that go beyond a narrow emphasis on the cognitive dimension, and co-create thriving communities by promoting connections among adolescent learners and the communities of practicing adults. Prior to directing GLCC, Nordholm was a small school development coach as part of the High School Redesign Initiative in Milwaukee funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She has served as faculty and project manager for institutions of higher education, has been a learning coordinator for a local school district and has taught at all grade levels, kindergarten - graduate/post-graduate. Her areas of continuing interest and study include constructivism, democratic learning organizations, assessment, teacher education and licensing, project based learning, and meaningful work/school partnerships. She has a PhD from Marquette University.
Suzanne Porath is currently a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction – Literacy studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison and adjunct faculty at Concordia University. As a classroom teacher, she has taught grades 6-12 in English Language Arts, history, science, drama, and study skills, plus supported teachers as a reading teacher, curriculum coordinator and team leader. Much of her experience teaching has been in American international schools in Brazil, Lithuania, and Aruba. Her PhD focuses on investigating literature discussion groups through the analytical lens of activity theory, with a research design based on formative design experiments. In addition, she is interested in the use of social media for teacher learning and professional development designs that support the principals of andragogy.
Wen Ma is an Associate Professor of Education at Le Moyne College. His research interests include the Chinese educational perspective, participatory discussion across grade and ability levels, strategies for English Language Arts and other content areas, and English language learners’ literacy learning and social development. His recent research addresses diverse Asian students’ identity and socialization issues, graduate students’ engagement with disciplinary discourse, and foreign-born professors’ pedagogical journeys and transformations in multicultural settings.
Yoonhee Lee is a doctoral candidate in Education at Arizona State University with a concentration in Language and Literacy. She majored in computer science as an undergraduate, but she didn't realize the strong relationship between technology and learning, identity and gaming, and language/literacy and gaming until she worked with Dr. Gee and Dr. Hayes. Through the SimSavvy project, she became interested in different ways of learning in online gaming communities. Her research interests are specialist language learning, English for specific purpose, and the ways of constructing and contributing knowledge in online game communities; also developing designing thinking and becoming social coordinators through participating in gaming communities.
Lisa Yamagata-Lynch is an Associate Professor in Education at the Northern Illinois University. Her expertise is in the areas of activity systems analysis methods, teacher technology curriculum integration, K-12 school and university partnerships, and instructional design. Her publications have been in journals such as Mind, Culture, and Activity and The Journal of the Learning Sciences. Her most recent work was a book titled Activity Systems Analysis Methods: Understanding Complex Learning Environments published from Springer. In Fall 2011 she will join the faculty of the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Carla Amaro-Jiménez is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual and English as a Second Language Education at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research interests include pre- and in-service teacher preparation for culturally and linguistically diverse environments, equity issues related to the schooling of Latino, bilingual English language learners, and implementation of technology for second language learning and teaching. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Distance Education, Childhood Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and the National Journal of Urban Education and Practice. She's currently a Co-PI and the Program Director for G-Force, a Texas-wide initiative aimed at increasing the number of traditionally underserved and underrepresented students seeking a postsecondary education.
Jamillah Grant's expertise is in the area of instructional uses of technology in education. She particularly interested in exposing the diversity gap in technology and ways to change the landscape of computing and information technology to include diverse populations. During her term at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Barbados, she formed the research group, Scholarship of Teaching through Action Research on Teaching, (START). The group has produced several collaborative action research which were published as books, book chapters and in various peer-reviewed journals in the UK, Canada, Italy, and Barbados both in print and online. The most recent publication is Sophomores Use of Productivity Tools The International Journal of Latest Trends in Computing. Other publications are Sizing Up Students for Successful Blended Learning Journal of Higher Education in the Caribbean UNESCO; Helping New Faculty Document their Scholarship through the Creation of e-Portfolios: Actapress, Calgary, Canada; New Directions in University Education: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Barbados; Teaching French in the Anglophone Caribbean, Barbados and Let the Games Begin! Naples, Italy.
Jacqueline Hotchkiss is a doctoral student in the educational psychology/learning sciences department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her background is in preschool and afterschool programming. As a Master's student, Jacqueline was the site coordinator of the Magical Web in Sacramento; an adaptation of the 5th Dimension program developed by Michael Cole. Currently she is working as a site coordinator in the CU-Boulder adaptation of this program, El Pueblo Magico. Jacqueline's academic interests include: the interrelationships of identity, learning and practice, undergraduate learning, the design of expansive learning environments, project-based learning and discourse analysis.
Kersti Tyson has spent the year with a foot in two worlds. She is a graduate student in the Learning Sciences Program at the University of Washington, where she is completing her dissertation. In addition, she is completing her first year in a faculty position in the Teacher Education Department at the University of New Mexico. Where, upon completion of her dissertation, she will be an assistant professor. Her dissertation is a study of how teachers and children listen to one another in two upper elementary classrooms. She is interested in understanding if and how listening matters when it comes to learning and being educated. While at the University of Washington, Kersti participated in a longitudinal research study examining one teacher education program's innovation of placing preservice teachers in community based organizations to better prepare candidates to teach children whose backgrounds are different from their own -- particularly children who attend high-needs schools.
Alan Nathan is a graduate student in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UW Madison. His dissertation work will look at the effect of Upward Bound on high school achievement and attainment. His general research interest is how school transitional programs such as Head Start, Upward Bound, and even the GED exam impact in-school measures such as achievement and attainment and out-of-school measures such as income and employment. His long-term career goal is to be an evaluation researcher specializing in K-12 interventions. He was motivated to join this group by virtue of his exposure to earlier readings and course work on design-based research and a general interest in learning sciences.
Adam York is a doctoral student in the educational psychology/learning sciences department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His background is in mental health counseling for youth. Currently Adam is working on a YPAR project, Critical Civic Inquiry (secondary students engaged in research on school reform issues) and REACH Mentoring (creating spaces for community among first-generation college students). Adam's academic interests include: participatory social-design experiments, multiple literacies, civic/political engagement and action, and sociocultural theories.